Your Name Is a Song: (Re)Membering Black Girls' Names

• In Event: Difficult Names: Women and Girls of Color Naming Their Truths

Abstract

Purpose: Naming has historically been an act of self-identification to claim agency and dignity for Black Americans. Because of their unique gendered and racialized struggles, Black girls’ self-definition and naming practices are a fight against stereotypes and forces that “limit opportunities, degrade our self concept, and render us invisible through dual subjugation” (Muhammad & Womack., 2015, p. 26). As Black girls read, write, speak, perform, and create texts in ways that bring them closer to selfhood, they are resisting such subjugation through literate acts (Muhammad & Haddix, 2016). Thus, this paper explores the question: What are the name stories present in one literacy collaborative of Black adolescent girls and what do these tell us about who and whole they are?

Theoretical Framework: This paper draws on Jamilah Thompson-Bigelow’s (2020) children’s book, Your Name is a Song as its guiding theoretical framework. In the book, a young Black girl, Kora-Jalimuso, becomes frustrated at school when no one can pronounce her name correctly. Her mother highlights several Afro-centric names, encouraging her daughter to find the beauty and the rhythm in each of them, including her own. I draw on this book to illuminate the beauty of Black names, the love and care of Black maternal figures who value those names, and the agency of Black girls to name ourselves for ourselves. I also draw on the work of Black scholars who have long been interested in the historical naming practices of Black communities to understand the richness and nuance of these practices (Smitherman, 1977).

Methods & Data: The data for this paper are from a larger project on Black Girls, Self-Love, and Digital Literacies, which the girls entitled Black Self-Love. I met with nine Black adolescent girls 14 times over the course of one semester (January-May) on Friday mornings at their school. Data for this particular paper focuses most closely on the week dedicated to sharing our name stories (Muhammad, 2020) as a way of identifying ourselves both individually and collectively. Together we wrote notes on our stories and shared them amongst the group to gain a sense of who was in the room, who we are each connected to, and who we are as a collective. The transcript from this meeting serves as the primary data source for this paper. I developed codes to analyze the data and find relevant themes (Saldaña, 2016).

Findings & Significance: Analysis of this data revealed that the name stories in this literacy collaborative (1) connect the girls to their ancestry, community, heritage, and the stories of those someone wants them to (re)member (Dillard, 2021) and (2) allows them to name and (re)claim their identities and their futures. This study is significant in that it (re)asserts the humanity of Black girls in an anti-Black misogynistic world and reminds us that Black girls’ names and practices of asserting their names are rooted in radical literate acts of self-love and identity (re)clamation.

Author

• Autumn A. Griffin, Georgia State University
  Presenting Author